Prototype
by Gray Voice
Summary: At the far ends of the galaxy, former hacker Yukari maps out for the corporate powers that be the bits of rock that no one else wants to bother charting. But an encounter with a stray escape pod - and the enchanting girl inside it - drags her into a dark conspiracy, and into the depths of her own innermost feelings. Yuri, Yukari/Ia.
1. 01

The hum echoing through the spacecraft's bridge droned on and on somewhere between the sound of a whale's low call and the buzzing of a fly trapped between the panes of a window. It was as monotonous a sound as ever, yet a pitch Yuzuki Yukari could never perfectly identify. Reading further into the noise was like trying to figure out the size and shape of a drill being driven into your head.

And as its systems kept relentlessly buzzing, the hunk of reinforced steel that encased both her and the sound alike hovered practically motionless over a nearby asteroid field, all of them objects scattered over the most arbitrary of sectors within a great star-filled void.

Leaning back in her cushioned pilot's chair, Yukari glanced at the slowly rising percentage displayed in the corner of the one viewscreen in the tiny bridge that accounted for more than half the ship. The numbers glowed with an eerie incandescence, more like faint candles than neon lights, and always hovering in front of that reinforced screen at just far enough of a distance to remind her it wasn't part of the actual material, that it was instead another piece of data being fed in through her ocular implants. The viewscreen looked so close to an actual window that she had to remind herself sometimes of the trick it was pulling on her, of the combination ultra-grade monitors and external sensor arrays that were Galilei Corporation's take on smoke and mirrors.

Out beyond that illusion of transparency, the stars were staring at her, little pinpricks of light twinkling out of the vast field of black. She gazed back at them long and hard, wishing somehow that one might move, might grow beyond a meager speck of illumination and give some life to the emptiness that surrounded both them and her alike. She had no real reason for wishing for that, other than as a change, a diversion. She knew the stars only as far-off specks of glowing dust or as the thin beams of light that her ship and its state-of-the-art engine could turn them into within seconds. Only she was quickly finding that those two forms weren't enough to occupy her.

Out of dull curiosity, Yukari commanded a system program to tell her how far-off one of those glowing specks were. A moment after the command flashed through her mind, a small flashing line of text appeared over the star in question, telling her that it was approximately 24.378 light years away, or about 8 hours, 14 minutes of flight time with the main engine engaged. It also warned her that approaching that star would significantly divert the ship from the navigation system's pre-programmed course, and consequently put her in violation of her contract as an employee of Galilei Corporation, Ltd.

Yukari sighed and dismissed the text with a wave of her hand. She was becoming even more fed up with having the word "violation" crammed into her skull so often.

In the corner of the viewscreen, the little percentage line was still rising in number. Nearby, a projection of the asteroid belt the ship was hovering over was becoming more and more detailed. And still in the background that hum, that ceaseless buzzing. Yukari had been sure for some time that the company could have done something to shut off the noise if they wanted to. She had a working theory that they'd left the issue alone so they could keep the pilots awake when they would most want to sleep, that it was actually kept on to function as the closest thing to a manager peeping over your shoulder that the higher-ups could manage out here. She was even certain that if the company could figure out how, they'd have plugged a program in her neural systems that would make her focus on that growing percentage display and nothing else.

She was looking away when the display gave a soft chime of completion. It didn't matter that she hadn't seen the numbers actually finish at "100%" or that she heard the chime right inside her ear, fed into her auditory center through the programs in her head. The sound was identifiable enough on its own by this point.

And then she was actually looking at the glowing "100%" marker and the detailed projection of the asteroid belt when the synthesized voice sounded in her ear.

"Survey complete," the voice said with an artificial calm. "Please examine the results of the scan before making your observational log."

Lurching forward in her seat, Yukari glanced over the scroll of data that appeared as the voice faded. Mostly carbonaceous in composition, it said, some S-types mixed in. Not much to speak of in terms of metals, anything really useful.

She leaned back into the cushioned seat and rubbed her temples. She had expected as much, especially after the system had warned her against passing over this region without a scan. For whatever reason, it was always the sectors the system insisted on exploring that ended up lacking anything salvageable.

"It looks like a lot of junk, ADAN," Yukari said. "I told you this wasn't worth checking out."

"You are reminded that, while subjective analysis is useful, overly opinionated responses have little scientific purpose," came the voice again in her ear. "Please limit your statements to more accurate analytic terms."

Yukari sighed again. She had forgotten "junk" was part of the system's word filter files by now.

"All right, let me put it _this _way," she began again. "ADAN, how much time did we spend scanning this single belt?

"The previous scan took exactly four hours, thirty-two minutes, and twelve seconds," the voice in her ear answered.

"And how long has an average scan taken on this trip?"

"The average scanning period, as calculated from a total of forty-eight mapped celestial objects, is two hours, nine minutes, and thirty-seven seconds," the voice immediately responded.

"See, that's just it," Yukari said. "There was _nothing _here except for some fuel for scrap liners, and you made us take four and a half hours to figure that out. And not only that, there was _so _much nothing here, it took an extra two hours to know for sure that all that was here was big hunks of charcoal. You can't expect me to believe that was worth it."

"You are again advised to limit the statements in your report to more accurate analytic terms. Failure to comply with Galilei standards of subjective terminology will be considered a violation of your employee contract."

Yukari looked out at the stars again. The stars didn't offer any answers. But then again she should have known better than to argue with a data network in the first place. She knew first-hand the only way of getting through to them generally required root authorization, and digging that far into the ship's systems was very much considered a "violation" of company codes. And of national law, too, she was fairly sure. She'd never figured out the details, but she had always had a hunch that a botched attempt at overriding root privileges on a Nebula Industries database was what one of her old partners had been locked up for all those years ago.

"Fine," Yukari said. "In that case, let me start again." She cleared her throat, vaguely trying to speak with greater authority but actually only having her voice come out in a dull monotone.

"After finishing the routine scan of this belt, my conclusion is that any return expedition would be a waste of resources. The data show primarily carbon and silicon deposits, with maybe a few more complex compounds scattered here and there, but I don't see anything to suggest we'd find them in any profitable quantities. My best understanding of the compiled data is that this belt could only be mined as part of a scrapping run of the greater region, and even then it probably wouldn't be worth it to send a big freighter. Anything else worth noting is reflected visibly in the scan itself. End report."

The display of numbers and the asteroid belt finally disappeared from the viewscreen. Yukari hummed in pleasant surprise, the sound coming out oddly close in pitch to the ship's background noise. Her briefer reports usually didn't end up satisfying the system.

"Well, I guess that wraps that up, then," she mumbled to herself. "So, ADAN, how's the current schedule coming?"

"As of the current time, you are seven hours, fifty-four minutes ahead of the allotted schedule."

"Which translates to what in the way of pay, again?"

"You are reminded that the Galilei Corporation values efficiency in its employees and rewards them accordingly. Consequently, assuming your reports and scanning data are in acceptable order, completing your scouting run with your present lead on the allotted schedule will result in a twelve point oh-four-eight percent bonus."

"'Efficiency,'" Yukari echoed. The word sounded foreign as she repeated it, like the syllables had as little meaning out of her lips as when she heard them in her ear. "Right."

Gazing back out at the stars, she made the mental command to ready the engine for the next jump. In the background the hum grew louder and the pinpricks of light slowly became the thin, laser-straight veins running through the emptiness that was a god of networks.

* * *

><p><em>Pawn. D7.<em>

The pawn moved there. A moment later the computer took it, gave a little chime to show it was Yukari's turn.

She studied the board hovering in front of the viewscreen, another 3D projection routed through her optical systems. The contemplation was mostly just an act put on for the benefit of her own pride. The computer's taking her pawn with a bishop had thrown her plans into chaos, and she could think of very little means of rectifying the situation. Sighing, she finally moved her knight in to help defend the home front.

She swore under her breath as an unseen knight swooped in to take her own, the projection animating a short sequence of the enemy smashing her piece to bits just to rub the point in. The chime after the move only left her more frustrated. Frustrated with the game, frustrated with the fact that she was left playing it. If she had been given a bit more room on the system for personal files, she could have been occupying herself with something less masochistic–maybe a music playlist or a holodrama or the like. But sneaking anything more than what she was allotted into the official system wasn't worth the risk.

It was just another one of the job's petty annoyances, Yukari tried to console herself, just one more challenge that she signed up for and would have to fight through. Nobody ever said that mapping out scrap millions of miles away from the nearest living thing would be all that pleasant, no matter how glamorous those 3D movies always made it look. She could still remember the elation of seeing those vid streams of Ace Pilot Kaito and his trusty computer guidance system back when she was a little girl, before she'd heard through the Black Hat Underground that Starsweep Productions was actually an unregistered arm of Galilei's corporate colossus. By the time she took the plunge to apply for Galilei Corporation's Star Scouting branch she knew better, but she still figured that even though being light-years away from home was dull and lonely, it was the best cover possible for a girl facing multiple counts of hacking and cybercrime.

Behind the illuminated chessboard, the numbers on the eerily lit display were still steadily rising. And on the chessboard itself, Yukari was quickly getting herself pinned into a corner. Like a fly caught between window panes.

She had no idea what her next move would be, and in all honesty, she'd grown bored out of her skull with the game anyway, but she feigned concentration nonetheless. Not that there was any real point in keeping up that kind of facade. Being bored by a chess game would have been rude around most people, but thankfully showing that kind of feeling in front of a computer was one of the few things for which she wouldn't be warned of committing a violation against company codes.

A few moves later a chime of defeat played in her ear alongside a bolded line of "CHECKMATE" that appeared above the board.

"Thank you for a very enjoyable game," came the calm voice, its tone identical to every other time it had said the phrase.

"No problem," Yukari muttered.

She swiped at the space in front of her and the chessboard disappeared. As it faded into nothingness, Yukari suddenly realized how long it had been since she'd played any kind of game with someone who was mostly flesh and blood. Or had even talked to someone fitting that description. Not too long before take-off, she decided. Only she couldn't remember off-hand just how many weeks ago that had been.

The thought made her wonder if there were any new messages the system might have filed away as unimportant. She prompted a still-blank inbox to appear in front of her face, but waved it away almost as quickly as it popped up. A dumb thought, she decided, to wonder if there was going to be anything new, anything aside from the standard parade of formal company status update requests. Even taking into account the transmission delay this many light-years away from Earth, it was more than a little naive to imagine anyone could or even would be checking up on her way the hell out here.

Another wave of her hand and a list of videos Yukari had on file popped up in front of her face. She wasn't sure which one to bother watching again. Preferably one of the ones she hadn't memorized, she figured. She decided against just allowing the system to randomly select one and finally settled on an old recording of an idol's concert she'd encrypted into the database. Encrypted through a basic key, but then again it was the encryption itself that was important. Even though her obtaining the file through underground channels technically made it pirated, the Galilei inspectors wouldn't go to the trouble of decrypting the thing just to look for that sort of signature.

She pulled the file into her neural system and played it. Inches from her eyes she saw the stage appear just as she'd seen it before, the array of lasers playing their pre-show lights the same way it had before, when it'd made her mother worry standing too close to them would leave her blind. She was right to fret that, Yukari supposed as she looked back on it. Even on the salary she was making now, Yukari couldn't afford optical augmentations. Mom certainly never could have.

And the concert played right through her eyes, like she was there again, like she was hearing the pounding, repetitive J-pop all over, only this time with ears used to silence and that low, penetrating hum instead of the humming of prototype shinkansen running past the slums and the nightly gunfire of drug gangs or whatever new form of the mob that had moved in. She enveloped herself in the music, made herself believe she really was hearing it out of that idol's mouth again, because letting herself remember even for a moment that the whole experience was just a series of numbers running through the nanochips in her head would make her remember how every other real noise imaginable was lifetimes upon lifetimes away.

She willed herself to believe she was really standing in front of the stage, surrounded by the cheering crowd, because it was the only way she could remind herself of what it felt like to look into the eyes and hear the voice of another human being.

So Yukari lost herself in the music, forgot that she was the only thing for millions upon millions of miles that could so much as breathe, that she was floating through the greatest emptiness imaginable surrounded only by the eggshell of steel that was the world's most advanced single-user vehicle. She lost herself for she didn't know how long, and when she emerged from that other life blinking in the artificial light of the craft she found the little percentage in the corner of the viewscreen still slowly ticking higher toward its patiently awaited destination.

She groaned at the disappointment of that sight. The computer didn't so much as scold her for that. Groaning wasn't a breach of protocol, after all. And it could neither agree nor disagree personally, but only follow protocol.

The perfect employee, Yukari supposed.

* * *

><p>She must have nodded off sometime before the scan had finished. When she woke up she saw the floating numbers sitting at "100%" and the image of the rock she was orbiting as detailed as the real thing.<p>

"Survey complete," came the voice in her ear. "Please examine the results of the scan before making your observational log."

Yukari yawned, took her time stretching and making herself comfortable in her seat. Somehow she found herself taking a certain pleasure in keeping the system waiting.

When she was good and ready, she took a look at the scan logs. They looked as dull as ever. Ton upon metric ton of carbon, patches of silicon, more frozen methane than she had ever cared to have seen in her life. Just another coagulation of matter floating around in space with nothing to claim but the sum of its parts.

"Yeah, okay, _great _find here, ADAN," Yukari muttered. "I'm sure this was _well _worth everyone's time."

"You are reminded that, while subjective analysis is useful..."

"Yes, all right, I _get _it," she cut in. "I was kidding, okay? Look, I get that I'm supposed to be the one finding the gold needle in the haystack out here, but it's just a little frustrating to always see heaping tons of scrap and asphalt instead of any actual _gold_. You get that, right?"

"Please continue with your observational log," the voice said.

Yukari sighed. She wasn't sure why she'd even bothered asking.

"All right, then." She cleared her throat, glanced over the logs again. Anything to keep the damn machine a tad more inconvenienced.

"Well, I have to say this one isn't much of a winner, either. It's mostly frozen, but the gases this rock has trapped inside it are plentiful enough back home anyhow, so beyond trying to sabotage someone else's tax cuts I can't say there's gonna be much use for them. The rock itself isn't much different from what you'd find in your average asteroid belt, so I'd say that, all in all, this one's worth skipping. Of course, if you're in desperate need of scrap, I guess you could..."

Yukari stopped herself, found herself staring at a bit of text she hadn't noticed before. Something listed under "Extra-Planetary Substances."

"ADAN, run by me what these metals are doing on this log?" she asked.

"Non-carbonic and non-siliconic materials detected within this planet's vicinity."

Yukari ran over the compounds listed, mouthing the items as she read each. "Yeah, I got that. But, these are _compounds_, ADAN—you know, like manufactured materials. This isn't just some meteorite that's caught in this rock's orbit." She stared at the totality of the list once she was through with it, let the low hum keep pounding into the back of her head. "Say, have we got permission to look into this whatever-it-is?"

"You are advised to integrate first-hand accounts of any substances found during surveillance missions into your personnel logs. Should this require slight deviation from your charted course, investigation is permitted in moderation."

"So there really _are _silver linings," she muttered, smiling to herself.

She swept her hand over the unused side of the viewscreen, tapped out commands on the holographic controls that appeared. The ship lurched to life with a slow build of thrust and a crescendo in its whale call of a hum.

"Well, looks like the two of us finally hit our wild card, huh?" Yukari chirped. "What do you think, ADAN? Suppose we might've hit on something alien?"

"All employees are advised that, in the unlikely event of the discovery of extraterrestrial life and/or technology, the investigation of such matters is strictly against company policy."

"Yeah, yeah," Yukari groaned. "Well, just because finding an alien or two might cut into profits doesn't mean I can't be excited about them, all right?"

The scarred, frozen surface of the rock below slowly twisted with the ship's forward thrust. Outside, the stars were spinning in tandem with that wounded surface, unblinking at it. Steadily, Yukari began to see a growing gray dot just past the viewscreen.

"Hey, ADAN, that our fellow satellite?" she asked.

"Confirmed."

She swept the control menus aside, magnified the image as the ship carried on catching up with the object caught in orbit. A pale, metallic thing, shaped like some kind of slug, or maybe a coffin. Portions of it almost looked transparent and seemed to reflect the far-off starlight.

Yukari frowned, straining to get a closer look at the thing. As it turned over in its orbit, she finally noticed the writing on the side.

"'Daedalus,'" she murmured to herself. "Wait—ADAN, that wouldn't be a ship's name, would it?"

"Unknown. No crafts with the designation 'Daedalus' were found in the Interstellar Vessel Registry."

"Well, it sure _sounds _like a ship's name," Yukari said. "Then, what would that make that thing? A scout bot of some kind?"

"Unknown. Cannot be determined without engaging a deeper scan."

"Well, it'd _have _to be a scout of some kind, I'm sure. Why else would it be all the way out here?"

The ship was nearing on the metal coffin now, slowing to run alongside it. Yukari peered closer at the image magnified over her viewscreen.

She swore under her breath.

An escape pod.

"ADAN, you sure what's in this log is all we have on that thing?" Yukari said. She scrolled through menus as she spoke, brought up other windows with more bits of moving text.

"Confirmed. Surveillance scan ascertained only material compounds within proximity."

"Well, you mind telling me if there are any life signs in there?"

"Investigating escape pods, distress signals, or other civilian emergencies during your surveillance voyage will be considered a violation of your employee contract. Please record all such instances in your surveillance logs and report them to the proper company authorities."

"Look, just tell me if there's someone _alive _in there, all right?" Yukari shouted.

The system was quiet a moment, giving only a high whirring sound of processing.

"Organic matter detected. Life signs are probable."

"'Probable?'" Yukari repeated. An odd answer for what tended to be such a binary system. "Is there some kind of interference getting in the way of a clearer scan, or what?"

"Negative. Scans suggest an ongoing production of carbon dioxide. However, scans were unable to track a noticeable pulse."

Yukari traced an outline of the pod, getting a better sense of its size as she brought the ship closer to it. "Well, I guess the only way to tell for sure is to crack the thing open, then."

"You are again advised that investigating escape pods, distress signals, or other civilian emergencies during your surveillance voyage—"

"Look, violation or not, someone could be _alive _in that thing, and if they are, we can't expect help to find its way out here in what you'd call a 'timely manner,' okay?" She slid her hands over the screens popping up in front of her, felt the ship lurch under her touch. "I'm out here to actually_ find _things. Now that I have, I'm not about to pass it up. All right?"

The system didn't respond to that. Apparently it wasn't that serious a violation.

"All right," Yukari murmured to herself. "Well, let's do it, then."

More swipes, more translucent displays to run her fingers across as the ship danced closer and closer to the steel coffin in perpetual orbit around the frozen hunk of rock. Alerts of an imminent collision blared inside Yukari's ears and she began to extend the docking gear from the craft's cramped cargo bay. A new display showed magnetic arms reaching out to snatch the pod out from its orbit, following it as it slowly inched inside and eventually ground to a stop, the door to the void outside shutting behind it.

Yukari kept her gaze fixed on the screens in front of her, watching the pressurization meters rising back up to normal levels and the docking feed disappear as it realized its brief task was complete. New screens showed up soon after others were dismissed, analyzing the visitor under Yukari's command. She trained her eyes on the text filing by like schools of pixelated fish fleeing sharks. Pod composition as expected, source still unknown, previous trajectory calculable, life signs inside stable. She filed it all away in the back of her head and brushed the windows of flying text away.

"So, whoever's in there doesn't need medical assistance, huh, ADAN?" Yukari mused.

"Confirmed. Subject is in deep cryosleep and displays no noticeable signs of injury."

"Well, that's a plus. But cryosleep?" Yukari flicked through a few extra screens, breath rates and pulse and body heat levels all rushing by as fast as she could read them. "That's not exactly standard procedure. It's almost like whoever's in there was meant more like a message in a bottle than a simple refugee." Still more data filing by, still straining to take it all in.

"So, would that mean you could tell me what the hell another person is doing all the way out here?" she murmured as she looked again at the feed of the pod quietly resting in the cargo bay.

"You are advised that further interaction with the acquired escape pod will be considered a violation of standard protocol."

Yukari chuckled to herself. "Read my mind, didn't you?" Stretching the fatigue out of her arms and back, she finally rose from her seat. "Look, I know I'm not exactly meant to be a rescue worker out here, but whoever's in that pod was _supposed _to be found, ADAN. Who knows? Maybe there's some bigger accident at play this was all meant to lead back to. Aren't we somewhat obligated to find that much out, at least?"

More whirring in further processing, the machine around her taking in the logic through its recognized keywords. "You are advised not to fall behind schedule."

"It's a good thing I'm so far ahead already, then," Yukari muttered. Dismissing the lingering tranquil voice in her ear, she strode the dozen steps out of the bridge and up to the massive door at the ship's rear.

* * *

><p>The steel gate ground shut behind Yukari, sounding even louder than it had when it'd opened, sealing the few square meters of cargo bay back off from the bridge. It was the first time she'd heard the noise since launch, the first time she'd been inside that tiny holding area now that she was off of Earth. Every other time she'd tried the computer warned her against wasting the time and battery power inside a part of the ship normally only used by transport personnel at take-off.<p>

In the center of the room sat the bullet-shaped case of dented steel, barely as wide as the makeshift bed Yukari used on the bridge, barely long enough to fit anyone not jacked up on growth augments. Yukari stared at it long and hard, all the data cycling in front of her face through her optical implant repeating what she'd read sitting at the cockpit. She needed the confirmation to make herself believe someone alive was actually in there.

The surface of the thing was smooth as glass yet seemed to bear no reflection now that it was hidden from the starlight, even along the cracks that showed through from the countless bits of material it must have collided with during its journey. Yukari searched across it for a hinge, some mechanism to open it. Not finding one, she called up some reference files to at the sides of her face as she continued looking. Along the sides of the case were minuscule indents the files told her were meant to be accessed by a specific code of laser cutters.

Sighing, Yukari called up the inventory of on-board tools. Though really it was only natural that an escape pod wouldn't open easily.

She brought up a scanning program and went over the lock on the side of the pod as best she could, given how unsophisticated the device was. The results transferred into the laser knife on file and Yukari picked the device up, started tearing into the air-tight lock of the unreflective steel coffin. Sparks flew and flew and still the lid didn't seem to yield, but she knew that was to be expected from such a makeshift recovery job she was pulling.

It didn't bother her. She had rarely ever had the advantage of top-grade gear. Returning to basics like this was vaguely nostalgic.

A few minutes of forcing it and she could feel the top of the case starting to give. She suddenly remembered that inside that pod was an actual human being, someone living and breathing and escaping from something, shook her like the bombs she could remember going off on the floors above mom's old apartment. She figured that cryosleep was probably the best thing to happen to whoever was stuck in that steel coffin. There had always been and always would be a million things that could go wrong in space. The last thing she would wish upon anyone was to be aware of a windowless sarcophagus all around you after getting away from whatever disaster this survivor had escaped. Yukari winced as she recalled her childhood, the basements she'd spent huddled inside with the rest of the building's exhausted residents for hours in terror of the gangs kicking up dust in each other's faces again, until National Security would finally get off their asses and run the thugs off the streets. She decided that whoever was in the pod right now had probably had it just as bad.

She felt the laser finally hit the end of the groove at the side of the steel case, felt tremors of the lid coming loose climbing up her arm. Thawing gasses rose up in thick clouds out from the newly-opened outlets in the pod, clouding everything in Yukari's eyes but the display from her ocular implant.

Stashing the laser knife away, she shoved the heavy lid off the top of the pod. It slid to the floor on the other side with the sonorous clang of steel crashing against steel. More and more gas came spewing out from the inside of the pod in waves pale and thick as she tried peering inside, her hands firmly clenched at the sides of the pod, the data from her ocular interface further obscuring her view of whoever was beneath those gasses with loading icons and empty percentage meters.

The gases began to dissipate. Yukari caught flashes of silver hair over shoulders, of skin pale and unscarred. More vapor cleared away, allowing her a closer look. Plain clothes, a slender body curled into an easy rest, a delicate face locked into the most peaceful sleep imaginable.

Yukari felt her breath yanked out from under her as her vision was finally left unobstructed.

She was staring down at the most beautiful woman she could ever remember seeing.

* * *

><p>AN: First, as always, a big thank you to Genki Collective for her tremendous help with this chapter as well as the fleshing out of this story as a whole.

This is a fic I've had rolling around in my head in some form or another for quite some time now, and it finally seemed the right point to get around to putting it out there. As I'm a huge sci-fi junky, it was more or less inevitable that I would put out a story under that genre at some point or another, so here's my addition. I heartily encourage any other such fans to look out for any and all references to/obvious influences from/blatant plagiarism of other major works in that field across the mediums.


	2. 02

The woman in the pod was plainly dressed—the simple, long-sleeved shirt and pants of mesh and synthetic cotton were the same ones Yukari remembered the Galilei science branch employees wearing back on Earth, yet their white shade was far less vibrant than the silvery hair that lay strewn over her shoulders and stretched down nearly to her waist. She lay motionless, more like a corpse than someone asleep, except Yukari could tell from some premonition beyond the text scrolling past her face that this one still had blood running through her veins and breath in her lungs.

Or maybe it just seemed that way because Yukari hated even thinking of the alternative. It would've been like staring out an apartment window at the dead, delicate body of a songbird.

A second scan showed ADAN had been right about her physical state: no cuts, no bruises, not so much as a scratch on the pure, lovely skin. But taking in more than that, Yukari found herself stuck on the slender legs of the woman, the toned arms and shoulders. Her waist had an almost muscular slimness to it, something that reminded Yukari of the holograms she'd make do with when it was too much effort to buy a local girl the bottle of sake they always demanded first—the stuff was a royal bitch to track down even if she was just going with the crap from genomed rice—except even the holos the other Black Hats would lend her didn't have bodies quite like this girl's. The programs sure as hell couldn't match the face, either, the way it made Yukari think of quiet waterfalls running next to meadows, both of them clear and fresh-looking, like what you'd see in those fuzzy historical vids the spiritualist types kept getting people to download.

New alerts appearing in front her eyes snapped Yukari out of the trance. Reminders, warnings of the cryosleep the subject was still in, the danger of a potentially injured subject being kept in it while within an environment at normal temperatures. She reached for a medkit, linked her neural systems to the basic bioscanner in it, then ran the device over the woman in the pod.

The scan finished, except that it took longer for the results to display than Yukari expected. All signs normal, accounting for the slowed cardio and respiration rates from the cryogenic state. No signs of internal injury, either. But Yukari couldn't figure out why the scans were coming in so slowly, why it'd taken so long to diagnose normality.

Then a final bit of text scrolled past her:

"No nanodevices detected in subject."

Yukari frowned at the text as it lingered in the display of her ocular. She ordered another sweep on the bioscanner, a deeper one, something that could find any possible adjustment made to the woman: the smallest nanocircuit, the tiniest trace of an augmentation drug, anything at all.

And again and again, all results came back negative.

Yukari shook her head as she dismissed the alerts. She couldn't remember ever seeing a total non-aug before, even in the ghettos where she'd grown up, where she'd long figured nobody else could afford one before her parents finally told her how the installation was part of basic welfare. No one else in the low-income complexes had even heard rumors of anyone without some kind of basic neural system, and the one or two times she'd seen the idea come up in the Underground all the other Black Hats insisted it was impossible. Getting folks plugged into the net right from the start of things was at worst a return on investment, they'd pointed out, considering it made for the easiest way to monitor consumer patterns. Then there was the windfall profits the pharmaceutical companies had made off implanting the interface, something that had long since become standard procedure at even the most septic hospitals out there, what with the neural's triggering of chemical production centers and dissipating too strong a dosage helping out with the lawsuits and all.

It was as basic as could be, like having your personal credit number or fingerprints. And anyone who showed up on the grid for maybe an hour without one would probably end up getting one, want it or not.

"So how did anyone let you into space without any of that?" Yukari murmured to herself.

She stashed the scanner away, went back to the woman in the pod. There was something about her that drew Yukari to her, something beyond her slim and toned body, her peaceful expression. Something intangible that made Yukari wonder about everything that must have gone through the woman's head while she was stuck inside that metal coffin and locked into her artificial slumber. Something Yukari couldn't put her finger on but knew couldn't be counted up.

Probably had something to do with this being the first person she'd seen in weeks, she figured.

A new alert flashed in front of Yukari's face as she came a little closer to the pod: an automated file detection warning her of some file tagged with Beacon status. Yukari almost didn't notice it at first. It had been a while since she'd paid attention to that particular alert. She'd long since learned to tune it out—back on Earth the most useful Beacons were crime awareness announcements she'd heard about hours before from the Underground, except most of the time they were just a handy means for plugging ads into your neural.

Figuring she'd better handle this with a bit of caution, Yukari ordered the system to scan the file but not to open it until she'd seen the results. It turned out to be a video log set to auto-transfer once the pod was opened, except the thing was badly corrupted, with huge chunks of missing data visible even during the transfer process.

She frowned again. That didn't add up. Even if someone had to upload a log in a hurry, there was no reason for the file to end up as damaged as this one was, outside of some kind of major interference.

Leaning against the pod, Yukari loaded the file into a viewer program and played it.

Her eyes filled with static, buzzing dots of gray and white swarming over the display field. A faint silhouette of darker lines began to coalesce behind the noise, although it seemed no less blurred and shaking. And all through her head ran a screaming, chattering noise of the broken sequence of ones and zeroes trying in vain to restructure themselves.

Finally the lines, the colors in front of her began to reassemble into the image of someone in mostly white—hard to make out for sure, but that same Galilei science uniform, Yukari thought—wobbling along with the unsteady picture. His mouth moved, but all Yukari heard was the same hiss of static, until the jumbled bits suddenly reordered themselves long enough to let him be heard.

"I don't know who's going to find this," the image began, "but whoever does..."

The hissing scream again. For a few moments, the image dissolved into a digitized scramble, but soon enough, the white, textureless science gear reasserted itself.

"...over to Galilei officials," he was saying, "only they would understand any of this, and only they can—"

Yukari grit her teeth. The stops and starts were beginning to get to her. She called up a few extra menus, ordered a subroutine to reconstruct the damn file into something playable. A moment passed, a percentage meter filled up, and the subroutine reported it'd amalgamated all the salvageable parts of the original file into a continuous stream.

"Guess that'll have to do," Yukari muttered. She ordered the program to play from where she left off.

"Project Ananke was..." the man in the science gear was trying to say now, "I repeat, a _devastating _failure...superseded its original parameters…the _Daedalus _is a lost cause, and any survivors...hope of rescue."

He jumped from place to place as he spoke now, like someone had taken all his movements out of order, but at least the static and the hissing were gone.

"Whoever finds this message _must_...for the safety of everyone else—I repeat, this is…must be disregarded...until her nature is better understood, I believe she must…if she has _any _brain activity...I can't say..."

And he began to fade out again, for a mere moment, until he jittered himself back into as clear a picture as the reconstruction subroutine could salvage from the file.

"Though I recommend…I repeat, do _not _terminate the subject without…too much work went into...Again, I recommend immediate…_Daedalus _and…Project Ananke. At this point, the prototype is…salvageable part of…our only chance is to…you _cannot _let it have contact with her—if that happens, I'm not sure even…"

Steadily the gray and white swarms were creeping back into the image, the hiss from before faintly worming its way beneath the sound of his voice. He was staring deeper into the camera now and his face was dark with a determination that seemed to mask a quivering fear.

"Once more, do _not_…you'll…more victims."

And he was gone.

Yukari stared at the empty display for a moment, her eyes readjusting to reality after struggling to keep up with the shaky image and the distorted voice of the stranger. She turned back to the escape pod she was leaning against, to the alluring woman sleeping so soundly inside it. Deeper scans showed no additional files within the pod's memory array. And she almost had to stop herself from trying to locate anything inside the woman's own rig.

"Hey, ADAN," Yukari spoke up, "you there?"

"Please issue your command," came the tranquil voice in her ear again.

Yukari could have smiled. She figured there wouldn't be a place on the ship the thing couldn't hear her.

"So, listen," she said, "this distress log in the pod here mentioned 'Daedalus' a couple more times. You sure there's nothing on it in the registry?"

"Confirmed. No crafts with the designation 'Daedalus' were found in the Interstellar Vessel Registry."

She looked over the logs her transcription subroutine had provided from the file as they started cycling in front of her. "How about anything on a 'Project Ananke'?"

There was a lull in the voice as a faint hum sounded overhead. "No results were returned for the phrase 'Project Ananke.' Do you wish to narrow your search?"

"Telling me what an 'Ananke' is would be helpful, I guess," Yukari said, shrugging.

"'Ananke' is the designation used in Greek mythology for the personification of fate. Used in older texts as an abstract concept alone, the word later on referred to—"

"All right, that's _plenty_, thanks," Yukari cut in. She sighed as she pored over the broken transcript still scrolling by in her optical. "Guess some Galilei higher-up just has a major mythology fetish or something."

She finally dismissed the text, turning again to the pod and the sleeping woman inside. The data display showed her vitals were still stable, but recommended immediate resuscitation.

That was just as well, though. The woman could very well have some answers herself.

Except it was more than that, Yukari thought as she went for the hypo in her medkit, loaded it with adrenaline and the other recommended serums.

Just as much as she wanted to know the truth of the matter, somehow, she just wanted to hear that sleeping woman's voice.

* * *

><p>She had to check and re-check the balance of chemicals in the hypo before she felt comfortable actually giving it to the woman in the pod. The normal dosage was designed for someone with an actual neural interface for the hypo to communicate with, something that could tell it how much to allow into the blood and then regulate the dissipation and the flow of the drugs on top of getting the brain to make more of the necessary ones.<p>

There were programs enough to calculate the proper ratios, but it was the crudity of the process that bothered Yukari most about what she was doing. And that made it different from the crude methods she was used to. Not having the exact tools for the job was one thing, but playing doctor without the proper training or even the most basic of safety nets was a whole different story.

"Just go through with the damn thing already," Yukari urged herself. Steadily, following the guide graphics her optic was projecting onto the woman's chest, Yukari drove the hypo in.

There was a moment's delay as the serum coursed into the woman. Yukari kept expecting her to scream, but she didn't let out so much as a gasp. She didn't even sit up – just opened her eyes and stared up at Yukari, like a cat wondering why it'd been wakened.

The look on the woman's face was one Yukari couldn't remember seeing before. Something all at once curious and afraid, something quivering with an inner fear but all the same wanting to stand its ground, all of it encased in and pouring out from deep and crystal clear eyes of sea-blue.

Yukari wondered if she'd gotten the dosage wrong, but realized she mostly couldn't think of anything to say because she was too busy staring back.

"Sorry about that," she said, slowly drawing the hypo out of the woman, stashing it back in the medkit. "I guess that's not the most encouraging of welcomes, is it?"

The woman still kept silent. Staring with confusion, hesitation in those deep blue eyes.

"Well, maybe I should get the formalities out of the way, huh?" Yukari offered. "I'm Yuzuki Yukari, Galilei Star Scout. Welcome aboard."

"Where is 'aboard'?" the woman finally spoke up. Her voice came slow and soft, even sensual, like the unfolding of silk despite the trepidation still beneath it.

"I'm sorry?" Yukari asked.

"What I mean is, where am I 'aboard'?" the woman asked again.

"Oh." Yukari wasn't entirely sure why it'd taken so long to put that meaning together. It had to be the odd way of asking it and the lovely voice behind the asking she found herself lost in, she decided. "Yeah, that's a plenty fair question. You're aboard a Galilei Scout Cruiser, Vigil class, registration number C-eight-one- something something." She chuckled. "Sorry, haven't exactly found much need in memorizing that number. But I guess the most important thing to tell you is that right now you're still some trillions of light years away from Earth. Since I found you during my scouting voyage, you know."

The news didn't seem to faze the woman much. Her unearthly stare, confused yet powerful, continued to pierce deeply into Yukari.

"I see."

The woman's laconic confusion was making it difficult for Yukari to keep up the conversation.

"So, could you maybe try telling me what, you know, happened to you?"

Those beautiful sea-blue eyes turned softer, but the perplexity in them remained as deep as ever.

"Happened to me?"

"As in, how you ended up inside an escape pod," Yukari explained. "Or, say, anything about why you're so far off from Earth, or even any interstellar ports. Only scouts like me are supposed to be this far out. I can't think of any reason why there'd be anyone else around for hundreds of light-years."

"Then, am I not meant to be here?" the woman asked.

There wasn't so much a kind of hurt in the words as the same confusion pouring out from her eyes, born more out of curiosity than some deeper fear. They still left Yukari shaken, from the tone, the melodious voice behind it.

"In a sense," Yukari said. "Or, put better, it means I don't get what you're doing here. But of course there's a difference between not understanding and not _wanting_, right?" she added.

The line didn't seem to register with the woman in the pod. The expression in her sea-blue eyes didn't change.

"I suppose," she finally said.

Yukari sighed, not bothering to hide it.

"Well, whatever," she said, "we don't have to get into any of that right now. How about you just tell me anything you can remember from before, all right? Because a certain message loaded into your pod's memory makes me think that, whatever happened to you, it was kinda important."

"A message?"

"Something really broken up, from a guy in the uniform like what you're wearing. He mentioned some things going wrong. _Real _wrong, from the sound of it."

"I don't remember any of that," the woman said, that stare of hers still so clearly fixed and strong.

"But do you maybe remember anything that guy was talking about? Like what it was that went wrong and made you end up here?"

The whale-call drone filled the bay again, longer and slower this time, all of a sudden coming in tones Yukari wasn't sure she wholly recognized. And all the while the woman's eyes stayed glued to the floor—for however long it took to remember just how annoying that hum was when you let it sit without any noise over it.

"I don't know," she finally said.

"You mean, nothing's coming back to you?" Yukari managed to surprise herself with the flat tone the question came out in, considering the wave of disbelief going through her.

"I don't know," the woman repeated. "It's blank. Like walls. All of it's just so blank."

She was still looking at the floor as she said all that, except by then it was more like she was trying to see through the alloys, the layers of circuitry beneath it. Like she was trying to stare all the way out into the great void surrounding the both of them from beyond the cramped metal eggshell.

Even if it wasn't meant for her, it was a look that pierced Yukari right to the core. It made the woman look so lost, like she didn't even know what a home _was_, let alone how to get back to it. Except it was like she was missing the familiarity all the same.

"Well, try thinking of just _one _thing at first," Yukari suggested. Blocking out the hum of the ship, trying to get the woman to stop with that look of hers, to maybe soften the expression she was making with those full, round lips. "Just focus on that one thing for now, and we can let the rest come back later, okay?"

The woman looked up, a speck of deeper hope somewhere in the sea-blue.

"I remember what I was called."

"That'd be a good start," Yukari said.

It was hard to tell, but she swore she really did get to see the slightest hints of a smile on the woman's lips, right then. "I remember I was called Ia."

And Yukari gave a fuller smile back, hoping it might encourage something in the soft-voiced passenger.

"Well, Ia," she said, "I guess it's time we got you settled in here, huh?"

* * *

><p>The bridge seemed far more cramped with two people on it, just like Yukari figured it'd seem. She didn't really mind that. Cramped was something she could live with, something she <em>had <em>lived with for all those years before she took up this job that demanded it most. The ghetto housing of way back when usually had her living with three to four in one room, and the heating back then sure couldn't beat out what a top-of-the-line spacecraft had to offer.

None of her roommates had ever been this strikingly gorgeous, either. So there was also that plus.

"Sorry about what you'll have to deal with for right now," Yukari said as she led her unexpected guest into the tiny bridge. "Ships like this are barely equipped enough for _one _person—I hope you'll be fine making do with it for the both of us."

Ia was looking about the place, her eyes darting all over.

"It's all right."

"At least it'll be better than staying in that pod for another few weeks, right?" Yukari quipped. "Even if space might be at a pretty good premium here."

She must have taken it all in by then—her eyes had stopped jumping about and finally turned to Yukari.

"I don't suspect it was your fault. It must be difficult to imagine getting visitors in a place like this."

Yukari shot her a smile.

"That's sort of the idea you get used to, yeah."

It looked like Ia wasn't taking the idea in well.

"Isn't that dangerous, though?"

"What? Being out here by myself?"

"That doesn't seem right," Ia murmured. "If something happened, then you wouldn't have any help, would you? You'd be separated from the whole rest of the universe."

Yukari chuckled. "Well, listen, _you're _the one singular thing that's happened to me this entire time I've been out here on my own. Which, believe me, I'm pretty happy for." She went into the toolkit by the viewscreen, pulled out another scanner. "And on that note, there's something else I still need to get sorted out."

"Is something wrong?" Ia asked, seemingly worried all of a sudden.

"It's just a procedural thing. Here, take a seat."

Yukari gestured her companion into the cushioned pilot's chair. There was a tenseness about Ia now, a clutching of her fists against her lap and a hidden gritting of her teeth as Yukari waved the scanner over her.

"Relax, okay?" Yukari said, as reassuringly as she could. "I swear this isn't gonna be invasive."

"What are you even _doing_, though?" Ia asked.

The sheer driving need in the question made Yukari stop with her hand hovering over Ia's head, the silvery hair descending from it. "This is just me trying to look into your brainwaves. It's about what shape your memory's in right now."

"Don't you believe me?"

And a greater, tremendous hurt in her soft voice now. So much hurt Yukari almost dropped the scanner from her motionless hand.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"When I told you I don't remember much," Ia said. "You don't believe it?"

Yukari sighed in relief, even laughing a little.

"No, that's not what I'm looking into. I _believe_ you, all right—it's just that I want to know _why _you don't remember much. I mean, that's unusual, you know?"

"So, you're just trying to figure out why?" Ia asked, practically repeated. "And that's why you're using...that?"

"Yep," Yukari confirmed. "That's why I'm using this scanner. That's all."

She went back to running the device over the woman sitting in the pilot's chair—sitting more comfortably now, her hands on her legs and her body no longer shaking.

"But, you're _sure _that's all you can remember?" Yukari asked as she finished up the scan, began to stash the device away again. "Just your name? Nothing about why you were out here or what happened?"

"I can't," Ia murmured. "I can't remember any of it."

"Absolutely nothing?"

Ia looked down at her hands a long moment, her eyes darker, her lips twisted in thought.

"Just the doctors. Their screaming." There was a kind of trembling in her lips as she stopped to think, the tiniest strain showing on her brow, narrowed in vague symmetry with her eyes stuck again on the floor. "I try to think of what happened before I was here, and all I hear is the doctors screaming."

The ship's incessant hum enveloped them both. Yukari let the enveloping continue a little longer, now staring at the shoddily carpeted floor of the bridge herself.

"You don't remember why?" she asked. "What was making them scream?"

Ia shook her head.

"No. Just the screaming." She looked up, out into the illusion of the stars cast onto the viewscreen. "And then I was here."

"Then, there weren't any others?" Yukari asked. "Anyone else who made it out from...whatever happened?"

"I don't know," Ia said. "Maybe. I think they would have tried to stay with me if they had left."

"Why's that?"

Ia was staring out at the stars again, now lost more deeply in their blank twinkling.

"I remember they didn't like leaving me alone very much. They did it at first, but then they didn't like doing it. I don't know why." And then she was looking up at Yukari with a kind of expectation in those sea-blue eyes. "I don't think they ever told me why. Maybe they expected me to know."

Yukari turned to a wall, started bringing up menus, data imported to her neural from the scanner.

"Well, maybe you _did _know, once. Or maybe you even knew something more."

"What do you mean?" Ia asked. She was standing all of a sudden, hovering over Yukari's shoulder, like she was trying to peer at all the information pouring out in front of Yukari's eyes alone.

"It's what I got from those scans I did," Yukari explained. "See, you don't have any head injuries, which is why I thought your memory loss was so weird. But I'd say your brainwaves explain it. They're all unnatural—erratic, even—which makes me think someone was messing with your head before you got stuck in that pod."

"Someone _made _me forget everything?" Her confusion was getting deeper, in her eyes and her voice, both shaking with the same trepidation of before.

"That's the only explanation I can think of. Your brainwaves are pretty much in line with what someone shows after getting their neural's memory core hacked into." Yukari flicked some menus away, brought up new ones outlining more of the data, Ia's eyes desperately trained on the movements of her fingers all the while. "Except the only complication there is you don't _have _a memory core. Or any other part of the common neural framework. So how someone managed to remove memories stored purely in bio without performing any kind of freaky surgery is beyond me."

"Is that what you're working with right now?" Ia asked, pointing in unison with the finger Yukari had trained on the menus from her optical. "You're using a...'neural framework'?"

"Well, yeah," Yukari said, almost laughing at the question. "That's why you can't see anything I'm pointing at. Even if you _had _a neural, I keep all my files set to private access, so it'd still look like I'm gesturing at empty air to you."

"The doctors used them, too," Ia said. "I remember that much. They were always swiping at the air."

Yukari dismissed the rest of the data projected from her ocular.

"And is there anything else you remember?"

"Nothing about what happened before. I already told you that."

"No, I mean _before _whatever left you out in an escape pod," Yukari said. "You know, like where you're from, who you grew up with. That sort of thing."

Ia looked at her with an even deeper confusion.

"But there's no need for you to know anything like that."

"Well, I guess it's probably not important as far as figuring out this incident goes, no," Yukari replied. "But it's not like I don't _want _to know. That's reason enough, yeah?"

"Oh." Ia shifted uncomfortably, as if she wasn't sure if it was okay for her to be as near Yukari as she was. "I'm not sure about that."

"You mean you don't remember anything before going into space?"

"Before?" She repeated the word blankly, without the slightest comprehending inflection.

"You know, back on Earth," Yukari tried to elaborate. "Or on a station, in orbit someplace. Just, _anything_ before you were out in the great big nowhere you and I both ended up in."

Ia stared back at the stars, her eyes just as distant, like she was hoping for her answer to be out there.

"I don't know," she finally said. "It's all such a blur. Whenever the thoughts start, it just goes to a kind of stillness, like I'm asleep, and when I try to think of what it's like to be awake all I can hear is the screaming. And before that it's the doctors asking me things, with others swiping at the air. All of it on some kind of ship, something bigger than this one."

"A ship all the way out here?" Yukari asked, trying to press as softly as she could.

"Probably," Ia answered. She looked away again, shook her head. "Or, maybe. I don't know. I just remember them talking about the ship we were on. I remember them calling it a ship."

Yukari sighed, even after trying so hard not to.

"So, you can't remember anything before that? Whoever hit your memory took your whole past from you?"

"You keep talking about that," Ia said. "My past. Before. Why is all that so important to you?"

"Just 'cuz I'm trying to talk to you, is all," Yukari said, shrugging. There was something that welled up in her as she made the motion, something heavy and burdensome as she looked back into the confused, sea-blue eyes. "I mean, sorry if I got too carried away, with asking you all that. It's just, I haven't really talked to much of anyone the whole time I've been out here."

"Oh." There was a distance in the sea-blue again, not so much an understanding as a feeling of what the words would have meant out of Ia's own mouth. "I didn't realize that."

"I probably shouldn't have expected you to. Even if you don't have any injuries, you're still less than an hour out of cryosleep. That's not gonna be easy on anyone."

Ia looked like she hadn't so much as taken another breath.

"Neither would months of being alone."

It got Yukari to look more closely at her, her saying that, got her to move a little closer to the pilot's chair she had a hand on now. Somehow, she hadn't fully processed how different the woman looked now that she was awake and breathing at a normal rate. There was a sense of life, of vibrancy in her, something Yukari could read from the way she was still looking out at the stars like they were places she wanted to visit if only she had the means. Only all the energy, the life in her seemed like it was muted, like she was singing softer than the song called for because she was afraid of hearing her own voice. Because Yukari could tell there was so much that this Ia was holding back, could tell from the way she held her arms in so stiff and close to her slim body, with its hints of toned curves that even Galilei science gear couldn't hide.

It all made Yukari wonder how truthful Ia was being with her, if she was bending things, keeping something from her. If she was hiding away personality, words, anything else there was to bury in oneself. Most of the Underground tended to do worse, the ones Yukari knew. She probably did herself, after all this time.

Maybe that was why she couldn't tell if the words Ia had let slip were meant as sympathy or not.

Yukari put a hand of her own on the head of the pilot's chair, a few centimeters off from Ia's. She couldn't tell if it was to stabilize herself or to inch closer to contact. It felt natural either way.

"You know, I guess I was never _totally _alone, technically speaking," she said. "I always had ADAN. For what that's worth."

Ia turned her head, looked up in confusion at her.

"What is an 'Adan'?"

"A computer," Yukari answered. "Well, maybe 'intelligence network' would be more accurate. That's what the acronym stands for, see: Automated Data Analysis Network—write that out and you can get ADAN, and that sounds a bit more like an actual name. Lets you pretend it's a real person a little more easily."

"Something tells me you don't, though," Ia said.

Yukari almost laughed.

"_Really_? How ever did you guess?"

"Real people aren't referred to as 'it' very often," Ia replied in a flat tone, as if she was explaining why you can prove the Earth was round.

And something about the tone got Yukari to laugh—_actually _laugh, something beyond the playful chuckles of before.

"That and real people have a sense of humor. You know, like yours."

Ia's eyes went wider.

"You think so?"

"Well, sure," Yukari said, confused. "Why wouldn't I? _That_ was funny."

And Ia was back at the stars again, blankly staring.

"I don't know. It doesn't feel natural for people to laugh at the things I say."

Yukari didn't know entirely how to respond to that. Something like panic was flaring up inside her all of a sudden, a kind of noise in the back of her mind alerting her that she'd just said something stupid to the one person she'd been able to so much as talk to in all this time. She swallowed it all down as best she could—it was harder facing that kind of anxiety, she was finding, after forgetting it had even existed for so long.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to, you know, make you feel embarrassed or anything."

"I didn't." She turned back to her, staring up again with the sea-blue eyes. Smiling a wide, radiant grin. "I liked it. You should know you have a nice laugh."

It was just for a second, but Yukari was sure then she'd caught a glimpse of something behind the woman's cool and laconic mask, something too bright and shining to put into words, glistening like light shining from underneath flowing water. She didn't want to look away, not for a moment. Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to break her invisible connection to this Ia, this woman she'd never even known had existed in all the universe but had somehow met while sailing through the vastest and most barren of oceans.

And she felt something deeper inside herself as she kept gazing. A spark deeper than what Ia had wanted lit, she was sure, but there it was in an electric splendor, against the universe's wishes. Her stomach closing in on itself, chest tight as a drum for the swiftest of moments. And the moment of that constriction stretched on, and she remembered there was a kind of nostalgia to this feeling, too, the way this moment was passing, something that sent through her neural framework images of skin sliding against sweaty skin in desperate rhythm. Memories she'd stashed away for the more private, more vulnerable hours of the job but were bubbling up for air now.

But there was something else coming, fast and painful: some other flash of voltage going through her as the moment began to loosen its grip from within her chest, something pointed and white-hot that left her second guessing every emotion that had surged through her moments earlier. Something that left her wondering if this spark she was feeling was actually like the ones she'd felt back at home looking into familiar yet mysterious eyes, as if talking to no one but that damned sexless computer for months on end had made her forget what it really felt like to be touched deep down by another human being.

She smiled back at Ia, giving her a nod meant as thanks.

"Well, I don't mean to cut us off now, but if I don't get back on course soon ADAN's gonna give me hell. Do you mind?"

Ia's eyes went wider again and she stepped aside from the chair. And she didn't move any further as Yukari plopped back down in the seat, as the hum of the craft started to make its crescendo with the commands Yukari had started swiping through. Yukari didn't miss the odd reluctance with which Ia took that step away.

Except there was also that distant look in her eyes again as they refocused on the stars out of the viewscreen. That same kind of vacant longing.

"As of the current time, you are six hours, thirty-two minutes ahead of the allotted schedule," came the tranquil voice again in Yukari's ear. "You are reminded that the Galilei Corporation values efficiency in its employees and rewards them accordingly."

* * *

><p>AN: As always, a warm thank you to my ever-diligent beta Genki Collective for her continually pivotal role in letting this update see the light of day.


	3. 03

"Do you usually have enough time to eat this?" Ia asked, the spoon barely out of her mouth as she slurred the words out.

It should have been difficult to understand her with a mouthful of artificial semi-solid rations, but somehow or other Yukari heard her clear as day. Something about the way Ia's voice was always so piercing and strong, she figured, despite how soft it usually seemed.

"Time's _all _I really have in here," Yukari answered. She'd swallowed as much of the stuff as she could stand in one go—maybe half a spoonful, even after all the time she'd had to get used to it. "I mean, sure, there's a schedule I'm on, but all it takes is a few swipes and I'm done."

"So that would mean you can give yourself long enough of a break to eat it all," Ia said. She'd swallowed her mouthful by now, somehow managing to do so by the time Yukari had finished talking.

"Hit one button, push another, and that's about it for work," Yukari said. "Though I guess I have to talk a bit about what's out there every now and again, and really that's the hardest part."

"It is? Talking?"

"Well, trying to come up with a summary beyond 'a fat load of jack squat' is the tough part." She dipped her spoon back into the bowl, and inside the container a meal's worth of carefully calculated nutrients synthesized into the consistency and taste of unhardened concrete let out a soft bubbling noise as it made way for the utensil. "You seem surprised by that."

"It's just that you seem so good at talking," Ia said, between smaller bites.

"You must _really _not remember much," Yukari chuckled.

"What do you mean? Am I wrong?"

The curiosity in her voice was enough to make Yukari laugh again.

"No, all I mean is that if _I'm _good at talking, you must not remember many interesting people."

Ia held the spoon in her mouth for a moment as her lips locked into a scrutinizing frown.

"I don't get that. Maybe I can't remember many people, but that doesn't mean you have to be boring."

"Sorry," Yukari said. "Guess my confidence still isn't with me just yet."

And it wasn't, she could feel, judging by the way something inside still trembled when Ia smiled at her or even just kept that sea-blue gaze fixed on her own eyes for more than a second or two.

"What did you say this was called again?" Ia asked, pointing to the gray globs left over in her plastic bowl.

"The official name is 'Galilei Amalgamated Nutrition Supplement Number Four-Fifty-One,' or something like that. Except I'm pretty sure all I ever called it is 'tasteless goop.'"

"Ah." Ia stared down at the nearly empty bowl, then looked back up at Yukari with a glimmer of hope. "Then, could I please have some more 'tasteless goop?'"

"Don't tell me you _like _this crap!" Yukari laughed out.

Ia blinked once or twice, blankly staring.

"Am I not supposed to?"

"Well, you're _allowed _to, I guess," Yukari said, "but all I'm saying is this isn't exactly gourmet. It's designed to keep you on your feet and not much else."

"Even so, keeping someone on their feet is a good thing. It seems like something we should be happy about, doesn't it?"

"Gratitude and humility aside, it's still just highly nutritious cardboard," Yukari laughed.

"Isn't cardboard a solid?" Ia asked. She looked as if she was turning over the question in her own head, carefully examining it from every angle.

"Okay, _damp_ cardboard," Yukari said. "In any case, now I know I gotta get you to a decent ramen shop or someplace once we're back on Earth."

"You must be someone who really enjoys food," Ia said. She'd set her empty bowl aside, apparently fixated on the conversation now.

"I wouldn't go that far. It's just that when I eat, I usually want it to be, you know, actual _food. _Not processed employee fuel."

"It's not wise to be picky. If you can eat it and it helps you, it's food." Ia was letting her feet sway back and forth under the pilot's chair, rocking to some rhythm going on her head. "Picky eaters won't grow up strong, you know."

"I'm grown plenty enough, thanks," Yukari chuckled. "Funny, though. I guess you remember whatever parental dogma you got, at least."

Ia shrugged.

"I suppose I do. But saying that doesn't feel like remembering anything, exactly."

"You don't think so? It sounded like you were quoting someone just now."

"But that's not what it felt like. It just seemed natural to say that, so I did." Ia tilted her head to the side a moment. "But then again, they do feel far off, those words. They make me think of being smaller and looking at things through a kind of glass."

"Well, I guess that's how we always feel about what we got from our parents, anyway," Yukari said. "It just kinda gets drilled into our brains, I think. Kind of like a second implant."

Ia was sitting still now, yet comfortably so. The distant look was back again in her sea-blue eyes.

"Were your parents important to you?" she asked. Her voice came out soft, as if she was afraid she could make some part of the ship shatter from her words alone.

"As long as they were around, I guess," Yukari said. "Though then again I never saw much of dad. He was always tied up in maintenance at a factory someplace. Usually he would get home real late, and then one night he just didn't come home at all. And mom was too busy with me and her slot on the neighborhood watch to take the time to find out where he ran off to." She shook her head, softly laughing to herself. "I never found out what they even made at that factory, you know. Guess I didn't get around to asking. It didn't seem important back then."

The vacancy in Ia's look had grown deeper, like she was looking past the emptiness outside, past the weak starlight that barely managed to pierce the dark. Except there was so much focus in the way she was sitting, so much strength in the way she held herself.

"You must have been so afraid," she finally said, the words barely a murmur against the whale-call hum of the ship's systems. "That was something you never could have expected. It must have made you so afraid."

"It's the past," Yukari said, trying to brush it off. "Nothing to worry too much about now. Really, I probably shouldn't have brought it up at all."

"If you say so." Still the distant, vacant look in Ia's eyes.

"I guess you don't remember much of your own parents, then?" Yukari offered.

"I don't," Ia answered. "It's so strange. The way you talk about your own people, about Earth and so much else, it seems so obvious to me all of that was a part of my life, too. Except I try to put myself into those places and all I find is me sitting alone with walls around me. With everything still so blank."

"Well, it has to come back eventually," Yukari said. "Even if we can't figure any of this out on our own, there are plenty of doctors back home who can get something straight. I mean, for all the guys who only care about following the rules, there _are_ a few who give a damn about actual people. It's worth a shot, at least."

Ia nodded once or twice, as if she was considering it all, as if the words had touched something beneath the laconic mask. The dream-like haze in her eyes lessened, driven off by a sudden brightness.

"I still haven't figured out something, though," Ia asked, breaking the silence. "This job you have—Star Scouting. I still don't get it."

"What's not to get?" Yukari said, almost laughing. "There's spare resources floating around in space and companies want 'em, except they want someone to map out the what and where as exactly as possible before they send in the big freighters. More cost-effective that way, you know."

"That's not what I mean," Ia said. "What I mean is that I don't get what this job does for _you_."

"'Does for me?'"

"It's so dangerous. And it's so lonely. Why would anyone want to have a job that sounds more like prison than work?"

"Most people don't," Yukari said, actually chuckling this time. "That's why they pay so well. And why they hire without looking too deep into your records. It wasn't the best of trade-offs, I admit, but for me those two points ended up being more important than the lousy parts of the job."

Ia was quiet again, for longer this time—how long, Yukari couldn't tell, going off only the percentage bar she could catch glances of in the viewscreen.

"What's your home like?" Ia finally asked. "Back on Earth. You must be excited to go back to it eventually, right?"

"It's gonna be better than here, sure," Yukari conceded. "Though there are lousy parts there, too."

"But what about good parts?" Ia said. Hard to tell from her voice, but Yukari could swear she was pressing with the question, had some deeper need to hear a fitting answer.

"There are plenty of those, too, yeah," Yukari replied. "But if you want examples, you might have to get more specific. I mean, you're practically asking about my whole life."

"Does that mean you stayed in one place?"

"I guess. So far as you can call Tokyo 'one place.'"

"So, tell me about this 'Tokyo,'" Ia said. She'd folded her legs under her seat, her hands on her knees. "It seems as if I should remember it. I want to know about it."

"But what I'm saying is there's way too much to tell, at least all at once," Yukari said. "I mean, you're kind of asking me about everything I've ever experienced."

"Except for what's out here," Ia pointed out.

Yukari smiled stiffly.

"There's nothing out here. Absolutely nothing."

"Then there's that much more of your home to talk about. And I want to hear about it."

There was something in her eyes that Yukari couldn't have refused even if she'd wanted to.

So she wracked her brain for a way to begin.

"Home is...every word I can ever think of," Yukari said. "But what I know is it being a packed-in place, a place where the space you're in had to be carved out for you. Except anything you might carve out, you only get to keep if someone else with more money or more talent doesn't come along and decide they want it more. So if you're smart, you either take all the money and the talent, or you keep yourself as hidden as you can."

The light in Ia's eyes had dimmed by now, pale and blinking in soft bewilderment.

"Then, is that why you're out here?"

"What do you mean?" Yukari asked.

"Because, out here," Ia said, "it isn't hard to keep oneself hidden. Even if there's nothing to hide behind."

Something in the way she said that made it hard for Yukari to meet Ia's gaze. In her eyes, the softness of her voice, Yukari could sense Ia's fundamental innocence. Yet that didn't keep her blunt words and matter-of-fact tone from cutting like a knife, no matter how kind she may have wanted them to sound.

"Maybe," Yukari admitted. "But sometimes all they leave you is the chance to hide." She set her half-empty bowl aside, stretching her arms over her head. "All my life I've had a feeling daylight was a luxury instead of a right. I think being out here just proves it."

And Ia didn't say anything to that. Her eyes were fixed on the stars again, reflecting their dim light like something glimmering under flowing water.

* * *

><p>The lines of data sped down the display on the viewscreen, guided by Yukari's finger swiping at the air. She groaned as she skimmed over it all, wanted to dismiss it outright but didn't feel safe in making ADAN a satisfactory report without at least scrolling through to the end.<p>

"Nothing interesting again?" Ia asked. She leaned over Yukari's shoulder, peeking at the space where Yukari saw the menus appear, as if she was trying to gaze at the unimpressive results herself.

"Another grand total of zilch, yep," Yukari said. "Just more frozen methane and carbon. I don't see anybody making much use out of this bunch of rocks, either."

"You're always so upset by seeing that," Ia said. "I don't understand. I thought you weren't interested in this 'Galilei' company's success in the first place."

"That's not the point. It's more a matter of feeling like I'm actually doing something _productive _all the way out here, you know? Plotting out nothing but scrap doesn't exactly make all this waiting around feel worthwhile."

"Isn't the worth in that pay you mentioned?"

"I guess," Yukari laughed. "But, as sentimental as it sounds, money's not everything. Something to live off of yet still actually have a _life _is best in my book."

"And that's what you did before?" Ia asked. "Something you think let you...live?"

"In one way or another, I guess," Yukari said. For a brief moment she could feel the memories, the details of all that happened working their way into her throat. She forced them back down, deciding to change the subject instead. "But, you know what I mean, don't you? Even if you can't remember what it was you _did _on that ship of yours, you wanted it to feel important, right? Or at least be enjoyable."

Ia nodded, still staring at where the menus appeared on the viewscreen.

"I suppose I must have," she conceded. "But the way you put it just now strikes me as a bit contradictory, is all."

"Well, that's just the human condition, I think," Yukari chuckled. "Contradiction. The mind isn't an organized place, for all we've tried to improve that."

"And yet mine wasn't," Ia murmured, her gaze far out among the stars again.

"Like I said before, I still don't understand that either," Yukari sighed out. "I mean, you not having a neural framework is beyond unusual, especially since company officials let you go into space this deep."

"Except I can't think of any reason _why_," Ia said. "I can't remember ever hearing the words for that device before. It's as if they thought I knew about it already."

The menus on the viewscreen were quietly blinking with various alerts, assertions that the scan had finished and it was time to continue with the routine. Yukari stared at them, past them, somehow managing to keep them fixed in her head and ignore them all the same.

"You really want to know, don't you?" she said. "What happened back on that ship, what all happened to you." She shook her head. "I mean, I _figured _you did, but I didn't know this badly..."

"But I didn't say that," Ia said, questions and surprise all at once in her eyes, her voice.

"You don't always have to," Yukari answered. "That's what communication is, you know? It's listening to more than just another person's words."

A kind of darkness settled over Ia's expression, as neutral as it seemed.

"Perhaps I've forgotten that as well."

Yukari reached a hand out towards Ia's, gently clutched it. Gave her the gentlest smile she could find in herself for good measure.

"Well, one way or another, we're going to make sure you remember it all, okay? Because even if we have to wait a while, I promise you, you won't have to live in the dark like this forever."

"You're still certain we have to go back to Earth to solve anything?" Ia asked. Her voice was small, just as before, but without a trace of hesitation.

"I don't really have any choice," Yukari said. "I mean, much as I'd like to trace your escape pod back to its source and figure out just what a bigger vessel was doing all the way out here, ADAN won't much like that."

"You have absolutely no way around your assigned route? You have to follow this path the company assigns you completely?"

"Short of pilot-threatening emergencies and breaking into the system, I'm afraid so. And even though I _could _do that second one, suffice to say it won't earn me too many points with the higher-ups at Galilei."

"You mean that they could fire you for it?"

"More like they could give me ten to thirty years of jail time for it," Yukari said. "And that's not even counting if they used the chance to convict me for some of the things they could pin me for, once they run the right tracing programs through what I've hacked into. It'd be an open-and-shut case, too—I don't have the right resources to keep my tracks covered for this job, see."

Ia was quiet a moment. Her expression didn't look troubled so much as confused, as if a rope she'd untied had knotted itself up again.

"I didn't know you had experience with things like that."

"Your parents didn't tell you anyone who breaks a software code or two is a bad person, did they?" Yukari chuckled, trying to hide the unease in her voice.

"I vaguely remember something like that," Ia said. She was laughing herself as she said that, the sound clear and full, like rushing water. A sound that gave Yukari a world of relief. "But I don't think that matters much. You've already proven them wrong."

"You think so?" Yukari asked, grinning.

"Yes," Ia replied. "Even if you can't do anything about it, you found it so natural to put yourself at risk for my sake. I don't think anyone who can do that could be a bad person."

She said that, and Yukari kept on smiling, as much as she wanted to reply, to make the naivety of that bit of praise known. How offering to help Ia didn't undo the cash trafficking for her own benefit, all the hijacking of securities she'd pulled just because someone she knew by alias alone needed trade secrets or a few key files erased. Even if she still was and always would be sure any system she broke into had it coming in the first place, it didn't mean she wasn't just a part of the bigger system itself, just another gear in that endless whirring cycle of gains and losses every nebulous hive mind of a corporation battled through with every other entity on the stock market. It didn't mean that every bit of pay she earned didn't come at someone else losing their job, or even falling below the poverty line.

And it didn't mean she couldn't have done anything about her partner, the only one she'd ever worked with to have an actual face and body to go along with the alias, after Nebula Industries pulled that raid of theirs. Yukari was just as guilty as her, but it was just the luck of the draw that the security protocols hadn't caught Yukari's rig breaking into the system first, just the fall of the cards that she had the chance to clear her tracks out of cyberspace while her partner's ended up saved onto a backup and presented to a national jury.

Maybe it was irrational and arrogant to think there was something missing in that picture from Yukari's own end, or that there was something more she should have done besides running off into the great big nowhere with another megacorp's ignorant stamp of immunity. But it didn't stop her from thinking it, even as she looked into those deep, sea-blue eyes of the mysterious woman now facing her, shining with all their hidden, innocent light. It didn't stop Yukari from remembering it all over again, or even from letting the weight of all those memories linger on as she tried her best to return that radiant grin shining for her and her alone.

"Thanks," Yukari finally got herself to say. "People saying that kind of thing, it's...uncommon, you know?"

"Really?" Ia asked, sounding somehow surprised.

"I think so, anyway," Yukari said. "At least, that's kind of what you start thinking when you see past the surface of things, back at home."

"The surface of things?" Ia repeated.

"Past the everyday parts of society," Yukari said. "Down deeper, into the parts I used to know."

"I don't see what I have to do with that," Ia said, shaking her head. "I can't remember having anything to do with things like that."

"That's not the point," Yukari tried to explain. "See, you look past the face of things, past the scandals and cinematic crime stories the news shows hype up, and you start to see nothing but a mass scramble of different sides clashing against each other. And I guess when it seems like there's this big world where everyone only looks out for themselves, it's nice to see someone who hasn't checked their brain at the door." She smiled—wider than she expected to let herself, even. "You know, someone who's willing to learn. Like you."

And Ia was looking away all of a sudden, back at the viewscreen and its illusion of infinity, except Yukari could tell there was a deeper kind of radiance on her lips, in her eyes.

"But then, there's still a whole universe of things I have to learn again, isn't there?"

"I guess so," Yukari chuckled. "But that'll have to come a bit later, I think. ADAN's gonna be chewing me out if I don't figure out something to say about this heap of methane in the next few minutes."

"And metal," Ia said.

"Okay, yeah, so there was silicon, too," Yukari said, "but I don't know if you can call that _metal_, strictly speaking."

"But it's out there," Ia said. Her voice had gone back to its soft, emotionless tone, her expression blank and faded. "Metal. It's out there."

Yukari frowned in perplexity, staring back at the menus in front of her as she swiped through them.

"Ia, I don't know what the hell you're talking about all of a—"

And she stopped scrolling almost soon as she'd started, eyes riveted to the line of text on the viewscreen.

_Artificial composition: various forged metals_, the line read. _Chemical makeup similar to Galilei compounds._

"That's...not possible," Yukari heard herself mutter out.

"Is it not supposed to be there?" Ia asked, her voice confused all of a sudden.

"No, but, you don't have the permissions, you don't even have the _augs _to..." Yukari shook her head violently, swallowed her growl of confusion. "Never mind. That's not what we have to look into right now."

"You don't understand why it's out there," Ia murmured. It wasn't so much a question as a statement, another indisputable fact she put out in that clear, unfazed voice of hers.

"No, I really don't," Yukari said as she kept running her commands over that line of text. "I've got no idea why a bit of scrap from what's clearly a Galilei vessel is doing floating in orbit around a few chunks of ice a trillion light-years away from anything, out in a place Galilei themselves told me _I'd _be the first person to get to." She swallowed hard as the last few lines of data scrolled onscreen. "And I've got no idea why it's the exact same makeup of compounds as the pod you showed up in."

Ia hadn't so much as twitched as she stood silently next to Yukari, taking in both the image of stars and the hum of the ship's systems. The distance in her eyes was farther off than before, no longer just a look of longing. It was a look that pierced past the light and into the void itself, so unfocused as to seem as if she had no place to look into but that infinity of dark.

"It's coming to find us now," she said. "Whatever I left behind on that ship. It's as if it doesn't want to stay buried."

"And I'm not one to disrupt that flow of history," Yukari said. Ignoring the twinges of hesitation pulsing through her suddenly unsteady hands, she swept through a few more menus, entered a few more lines of commands.

"Your request for a scientific retrieval operation has been acknowledged," came the tranquil voice in her ear. "Please make sure to make the best possible use of this optional step within your scouting process."

* * *

><p>It took longer than Yukari expected any retrieval process could take to get that stray bit of scrap metal into the small cargo hold. Maybe it only felt that long because of how she and Ia both couldn't seem to think of anything to say after ADAN had its brief say and there was only that damn humming to take her mind off of complete silence, but even with that in mind the logs reported back an elapsed time of around eight minutes for the whole operation, which Yukari didn't exactly consider speedy. Especially considering that all the ship had to pick out of space was a half-meter long hunk of amalgamated metal nanotubing, with hardly any stray rocks nearby to make a challenge of things.<p>

Yukari probably could have made the whole process go faster if she'd controlled it manually, but somehow, she couldn't trust herself to take control. Every time the wait seemed too long she'd feel a kind of trembling in her fingers, like what she felt every time she thought of rerouting a nearby ATM to buy a meal the next size up for the night after the raid had gone down. She didn't trust herself to do a steady job back then with her hands quivering that badly, and she wasn't about to give herself the benefit of the doubt now that she had a spaceship's trajectory to worry about instead of just virtual fingerprints left behind in a phony transaction process.

She'd led Ia back into the cargo hold, right back next to where the escape pod still sat open, spilling out traces of the visible fumes of liquidizing gases. The ship's network of cosmic object retrieval arms had deposited the hunk of metal unceremoniously onto the floor nearby. The bit of scrap was scorched along its roughly-cut edges, outlined with uneven blobs of forged compounds fried to a pitch black, but in faint lettering Yukari could still make out part of what was once written on the side of the thing.

_Daed_ was all that was left. But it wasn't hard for her to picture how the rest of that lettering must have flowed.

"I just don't get what would've done this," Yukari said as she peered over the scrapped hunk of metal. "I mean, it doesn't make sense. You don't scuttle a ship this far out, and there's even less point in blowing an escape pod to bits."

"You're certain that's what it is?" Ia asked. She was more fixed on Yukari than the bit of scrap metal. "It doesn't have to be from an escape pod, does it? Even if it came from the same ship I came from."

"Well, like the scan said, the material's the same as the box you were lying in," Yukari said, "and this isn't exactly _common_ stuff. You just don't design an escape pod with the same properties as you'd want for any other part of the ship, see—it's meant to support just one person, two at the most, and stripping away every system but a self-guidance network means all the protection you're left with is the outer hull. All that means it's gonna be the toughest stuff money can buy." She kicked the hunk in front of her a couple times, the only sound from the impact a few soft thumps. "Kind of like what we've got here."

"I didn't think you had so much experience with this sort of thing," Ia said.

"I don't. But when you work a waiting-based job where they only give you tech manuals to read, you tend to pick up on a few things."

Yukari stooped over the scrap of metal, peering more closely at the burns, the faded lettering.

"But I just can't think of any reason for a pod to get junked like this," she said. "I mean, from what all those tech files say, you can only get burns this bad from a mining laser—or maybe something similar—and who'd be going around blowing things up with one of those all the way out here?"

"Maybe it was an accident of some kind," Ia suggested. "You said something went wrong on that ship I was on. Maybe this has to do with that problem."

"Maybe," Yukari said. "I guess it could even be this got launched without anyone inside it. I mean, you were farther out than this pod ended up, so it stands to reason you were launched first."

"And then a malfunction sent another empty pod out?" Ia said. Her voice was soft again, but quivering, like there was something in the sound or even the feel of the words that left her refusing to believe them.

Yukari shook her head, still staring down at the scorched artifact, not sure what to make of anything she was taking in. Reaching out a hand, she palmed the frigid metal, finally gripping the blackened and uneven edge with both hands and giving the entire panel a quick lift upwards.

She felt her eyes go wide, her throat dry up. Lifting the piece of scrap up with her as she stood, with her legs and arms both turning to jelly.

"No," Yukari said. "It looks like we can rule out it being empty, at least."

And towards the other woman she turned that former piece of escape pod, and the great, shapeless patch of dried, dark crimson burned into the other side.

* * *

><p>AN: As always, I want to give my utmost thanks to Genki Collective for her incredible diligence, patience, and thoroughness, both in her ever-valuable editing and the navigation of time zone differences said editing makes necessary.


End file.
